Category: Blind Faith

Why do poor people, the enormous “underclass” vote for a billionaire who never will support them? We let the excessively rich fool us. Is it the Walter Mitty fantasy of moving from rags to riches? Them days are gone forever. Those who have the most will keep it, largely by underpaying, imprisoning, enslaving workers. They get rich by robbing those who lack weapons or group power. It is no accident that union membership is falling off. The misled or fearful do not join.

How can poor people vote for a candidate who boasts about his wealth and promises well-paid jobs but whose history totally denies this? This person was not chosen to run by you and once elected, will do nothing for you. His or her or their corporate bosses or personal greed determines their post-election behavior. But they need your vote to win. This entails a necessity of deceit. The lying begins.

The voters fall for phony promises. You become a young child whose parent promises fairy tale wonders. Many have trouble giving up this belief even after they see themselves betrayed. They remain trapped in the childhood wish and blame themselves or others for its failure to manifest.

Work enacted for those who “own” the corporations is increasingly done by machines or by near-slave populations including those in US prisons. So much money is earned this way. Should there not be a living wage taken for those who now work short hours or those who cannot work at all?

Our President answers no. Look at the Trump hotels (he sells his name, you know), and Trump golf courses in many nations. Notice that there is a law suit gaining momentum against Trump for receiving emoluments (sales due to his position.) His Inherited wealth was largely first extracted from impoverished tenants, more recently produced by underpaying or not paying builders laid off the job midstream by intended bankruptcy. The uncompleted building is sold as a fictitious loss. Trump boasts about his success as a businessman. There is plenty of deceit in the accolade.

Trump and Co.’s attitude towards federally -funded health care is kill’em off. The profit from cutting human health services is added to profit from filling the jails and closing public schools; associated with using police violence to scare impoverished, angry people into silence. Whole nations now do “austerity” which means cutting back on public services because, “government lacks the money.” People at the top keep the disclaimed funds.

But wait a minute. Is austerity the only possibility? Is it only wealth for a few at the top? Look at what just happened in England? Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labor leader in Britain. He said he is stopping “austerity” enactments. Going to create jobs for the people. Especially for the youth who voted for him. Will create an economy.

It takes courage to call a lie a lie. Politicians promise to change what they have done still controlled by their funding corporations. They lie about what they did before or toss the blame at their opponents. They lead you into hating those who are superficially different but whose basic needs are the same. It is a ploy to dis-empower: gay vs. straight, white vs. black. Jew vs. Gentile vs. Muslim vs. atheist vs female. vs….Nonsense.

Let us look at the ignorant, compulsive need by our president who insists he has the answer. He claims that climate change is a hoax enacted by the Chinese. His need to-be seen as “right” requires drawing up the bridges against the encroaching flood of science. He shouts with pride that we are to dig the coal (no one wants to buy). Announces, let the oil flow that pollutes our water. Ignores the polluted ocean, the dying fish, the Fukushima-irradiated Pacific, the slowing of the Gulf Stream – warm top, cold bottom, a recycling water force needed to stave off the next Ice Age; ignores tornadoes and drought and flood …. and death. All that matters to the sociopathic few at the top is their numbers in the bank. But their numbers are going down.

Trump and his cadre of power hungry, uninformed associates, do not know that the outside world is on an economic upturn making non-polluting devices and creating ways to offer personally generated power to the people. Trump fired almost anyone who knew about the environment and put an anti-Global-Warming person in charge. He made it illegal for the EPA to publish.

Fascism has-to do with an amalgam of government and corporate power. It’s amazing how the incompetents who made a lot of patriotic noise have come to run the country. We need to take to the streets banging pots and pans and stay there to demand government use our tax money to support our needs. Same with Social Security. Our life time investment is not an “entitlement.” We need to not return to a submissive state. We need to vote the ineffectual sell-outs out of office. Return to the future.

Say a pair of robbers intend to grab your wallet from your back pocket. The street is crowded. It is not unusual for one person to bump into another in a crowd. The person who bumps you is very apologetic, even brushes you down while his partner removes your wallet. Take another example of intended distraction. A gang wants to break into your house and rob you. Rather than relying on the hoped-for event, one that no one will notice, they start a fire at another house in your neighborhood. Pretty soon there are police cars and fire trucks and noise and smoke and crowds. The damage done by the fire may be small or large but the gang doesn’t care. What matters is that no one notices as they break in and root around until they find what they are looking for and then escape with the swag.

The same thing is happening to us now. The newly elected Trump government is seeing how far they can go in breaking down formal, legal requirements and restrictions and get away with it. They ban the Muslims from getting into the US the first time, also from returning home from business or family trips. The Muslim outrage is their fire down the block. Everyone is up in arms. Huge crowds with posters are screaming “let them in” at airports though out the country. The ACLU is involved.

Trump fires his acting Attorney General Sally Yates, a longtime Government employee who ordered the Justice Department not to follow Trump’s immigration order. She rejected Trump’s anti-constitutional stance of condemning a people of a certain religion. The Trump White House said she had “betrayed the Department of Justice” and wasn’t “protecting the citizens of the United States.” The issue of protection is frequently used to shut out objecting voices. Eventually, Sally Yates will be replaced by Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) Do you notice enough people demanding that her firing be undone? The Department of Home Security felt it could ignore a Federal order and no one is taking it seriously enough. It is an important step in the wrong direction.

Then there is the issue of names. Remember how Nazi Germany asked for the name of Jews who had committed crimes. Giving these names to the public created an enemy’s list of people best removed. It made people ready to believe that Jews caused the you-fall-for-it Reichstag fire. Now Trump spoke of getting names of law-breaking Muslims, one assumes to eventually do the same

Then there are other lists. The Trump transition team asked for a list of all Department of Energy employees or contractors who have attended ”climate change meetings.” The Climate Change group is treated as clouded with Obama’s image, Trump’s rival and reportedly ” a bad president.”

Asked the names of people are looking at the consequences of increased carbon. In the coming 10 percent downsizing, it is clear who will be chosen to leave and who let stay. The person chosen to head the EPA, Attorney General Scott Pruitt, is a climate skeptic who has sued the EPA fourteen times.

Four members of the State Department, have quit. Trump in his utter disregard for the truth said he fired them. People want to regard this as a normal change in government but it isn’t. It is more a dismemberment of what works. The EPA has been ordered not to put out information. Many have used Twitter to break the environmental news with unknown names attached. There are cracks in the takeover but the game has not ended.

The new budget has enormous cuts to commerce and energy, to education which does not know how it will survive. The Committee of Public Broadcasting will be entirely privatized. There will be no money to the Natural endowment for the arts, similarly the National Committee for the Humanities. There is not a peep of a thought of taxing the rich, the billionaires and millionaires who make up this ruling body. It is a “let them eat cake” philosophy.

With the Sally Gates being fired affair, the main issue is that Trump ignored a Federal order. People standing in a protest line against Muslim exclusion, while a serious issue, is falsely cathartic in the larger sense. The Executive Order against Muslims was done outside the normal process. It had no legal reviews. The system of checks and balances the US has in place are not working.

People are forced to accept DeVos as Education Secretary, who made her money in non-public school education and as such has conflicting interests. DeVos is inappropriate for this job since she has repeatedly shown herself to be against Public schools and wants Christianity to be taught there. Most of the Trump “chosen” have their hands in the till of the thing they are there to supervise and are ill-equipped for the job.

Significant is Trump’s acceptance of Steve Bannon as his chief strategist. This alt-right, misogynistic, anti-Muslim, anti-Semite is kept on despite a public outcry. This shows Trump and his cabinet’s intent to throw aside much of what the US claims to stand for. Part of this is inevitable since they are so ill-prepared for the job. One hopes that the Trump government will gain wisdom and accept the guidance of experienced people who understand democratic values and how to make things work. But don’t count on it. Journalists, photographers at rallies are arrested as law-breakers. These people are the documenters of reality. We need them.

How far can they go?

The big scam is underway.

Please consider reading my book Unloved Again. Email me directly a elangolomb@gmail.com in order to get your signed copy. Paperback ($16 Squareup.com/store/elangolomb.

Listened to a discussion of how we are exterminating elephants, one every 15 minutes for their tusks (ivory) whose buyers do not know that the elephant is killed to get them; to the way polar bears now have to swim 100 miles to find food and often die on the journey; to how our President Elect’s son joined the extermination fad by shooting animals in Africa for sport, and on and on. I listened to this and wept.

How did we develop the willingness to take what isn’t ours, to aggressively use it up with no respect for the victim’s sacrifice, to ignore mass extinction and have no sense of sharing the loss? This represents a breakdown in our sense of being part of a family of the living. The urge to take and slaughter often has a religious base, a standard manipulation for those citizens who serve the taker” by being at the front of attack. Harm is done in a religious cause, mine good and yours bad, like marauding soldiers in search of the Holy Grail.

The Pope told his religious followers as well as those deep in debt like Columbus and his crew, to take the land and its riches. Columbus enslaved natives to dig for gold until they died. He and his fellow henchmen lived by the sword, killing for the fun of it, loping off limbs, extracting infants from the womb. The land acquired was based on murder. A religious leader designated it as right. As it is today with the “towel heads” who claim to own the oil beneath their feet… and with the Muslims we are told threaten us so must be contained or wiped out. There is the greed of “taking” behind our manipulated fear.

Then comes our country’s second enormous crime, slavery. Using stolen men as unpaid labor created great riches for the few. In other cultures, people taken as unpaid labor after losing a war have a time limit after which they are included as full members of society. Not here. Slaves and their children’s children remain slaves. When importation became difficult, slave owners bred them, treated them as insensitive animals who barely missed their children sold and taken away. Today, the former slave population is increasingly unnecessary as factories move to countries that pay the workers less. The prison society for this surplus population is supported by our taxes.

The “taking” culture continues via taxes. Money is taken from the middle class, from public services, the parks and schools, etc., to make the rich richer. Blacks in ghettos are called inferior so why waste money on them? Public schools are underfunded and then abandoned as not meeting goals. State supported colleges have only teachers as poorly paid by the job consultant. Education is devalued. Muslims, Jews, women, gays and on and on are dropped from public concern. Our nation continues to rob its residents including its plants and animals by designating them as unworthy.

And so, we came to this country to rob Mother Earth of her goods as if our survival is not attached to hers. We are approaching a critical edge from which there may be no return. Because of our addiction to having more “things” we cannot see where we are and what we must do next. Change is always difficult. We need to awaken from the dream of having “more.” Change is the only thing that is real.

Mother Earth is beginning to shake us off like a dog does to mud and water and fleas.

What we do is causing Earth’s shaking. We call these self-created incidents unintended accidents although we are deluged with facts which say differently. We refuse to connect this with that. We ask the engineer to correct our designated “mishaps” rather than change the basic notions of how to live.

We are not horrified at being labeled “consumers.” Our ability to adapt to the impossible has consequences. It was eating the forbidden apple that caused God to throw us out of the Garden. What was in that apple? I imagine the ability to detach ourselves from life so that we can consume it. It is the hungry consumer’s “mouth” which banishes us still.

The Gaia vision shows that all things are interconnected. We nix that. We treat Earth’s living parts as “things.” Destroying the part unravels the whole. All life is connected. One energy. As a result of our incursions, life is held together by fraying strings.

Let us look at a few of our attacks on the web of life. We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to impress the Russians. Now Fukushima, victim of a tsunami is spewing radioactivity into air and ocean but we refuse to discuss it. We fear our knowing “fear” itself as well as a reprisal for speaking the truth by the nuclear industry. Our silent mouth destroys us. We napalmed the Vietnamese which poisoned their land for generations. We poisoned the soldiers who dropped our napalm and then refused them medical care. People who do our catastrophic bidding are treated as “things.” War is a tremendous money maker. Those who sell war stuff create catastrophes to alarm the citizen who is minding his own business to go out and fight.

Consider what we eat. Our national food is burger and fries. We kill cows raised in the suffering of a factory. They do not wander the fields and eat grass. We unthinkingly devour them. In our mind, the beef on our plate never lived. Trees in the Amazon are cut down to plant grass for McDonald’s. A couple of rainy seasons and is all is dragged away by the seasonal flood. McDonald’s should have the logo of a desert flying over her inviting doors.

We frack for gas which poisons the water and causes landslides. What we inject in the earth is unknown. It is a corporate secret. We accept a gas pipe being laid alongside the spent fuel pools at Indian Point. In a school where performance counts, someone with this idea would be left back. Instead, we gamble away our safety and secretly accept the death of millions to save a few bucks. Eyes on the prize, we are harbingers of death.

The methane pouring out of the heating up of tundra in Russia which holds onto heat adds to the heating done by gas. All is setting the world on fire. Mother Earth is growing angry at the shredding of Gaia by folk who do not use the enormous energy of the tides and the lesser energy of sun and wind.

Mother Earth is shaking us off with landslides and tornadoes and droughts and floods, with new diseases brought on by its being too warm, too wet by starvation because it’s too dry. Animals and plants die in the heat. Roots rot in the flood. Food is disappearing. Life is clinging but losing its grip. But still we kill our animals to gorge on life; still, we buy clothing made by slaves in China. We grossly overpay our CEO’s and conversely underpay our teachers. We wait for a better tomorrow rather than change our ways today.

Earth will shake us off as a failed experiment. Gaia will recover over millennia. Time means nothing to her.

I Wanted to Study how I learned to love those who could not love. It was writing Unloved Again that taught me the origin is childhood pain denied.

You who love those who cannot love you or reject those who can, do not know why you do it. It is like you are in a state of amnesia. You do not know how you got here. Things simply happen to you. If you are unable to see that it is you who make the choices, in effect the same mistakes, ask the opinion of people who are objective. Repetition is a tell-tale sign of choice.

It is like you are perched on the roof of a dark and shuttered house. You do not know how you got there nor how to enter. You periodically receive messages from that house along with feelings. These messages tell you who to love and hate including to hate yourself. You think these messages come from the “real you.”

Why do you assume that this inner voice represents your adult self? It is like believing advice from someone who profits if you make the “right choice.” Accepting the terrified thinking of your inner child and the terrifying directives of your inner parent denies that you can grow. You are to remain fixed in childhood. You may fool yourself into accepting these opinions by calling them your “intuition.” There are so many ways we fool ourselves.

The internal structure of the darkened house is very fragile. Its parts connect one to the other like cripples leaning against one another for greater balance. If one of them steps out of the pack, all the rest fall down. The source of this mad circumstance of lasting disorder is that it represents half fighting and half surrender. It is the power of surrender which brings the parts down together – I fall into you. It is the power of resistance which binds the two together – You can’t get up without me. This building is covered by a dark roof which protects its contents from the wind and rain of recognition. You are to hear what it tells you and feel what it sends you but not understand the source.

How the child survived with unloving, brutal and rejecting parents is what the house is about. Many of these aspects have to do with denying the reality of what happened. The child turns his abuse into something better or takes the blame for it. If it all was his fault, punishment was called for. Does he need more? The parent was a bully whose nails of hatred were hammered into the child’s wood of self-identity. How does the adult handle this? How does it color his view of love?

The adult perched on the roof hears the child’s distant cry and takes it as his own. He has not separated from his internal child. Some neurotically-driven people dedicate their lives to saving the inner child. But you cannot rewrite the past. You can only understand it in order to leave the past behind. Those dedicated to saving their remembered inner child, sacrifice their present life. There are many forms of arrested development and this is one.

To accept the feelings and directives from that darkened house is to declare yourself invalid. You need to break into that mental building and examine its every piece. Study the child’s willingness to surrender. See the rationalizations and lies that make this possible. Study your parent’s emotional weakness which underlies their terrifying behavior. Remember them as hungry ghosts, throat too small to swallow and fill their endless need (Dante’s Inferno) Get a calendar in your mind so that you can distinguish past from present.

You will be energized to follow this difficult path by pain. See that your pain was inflicted by a cruel parent who needed to injure their child. Reject accepting pain as the path to love. Do not identify punishment as love. Pain is pain and nothing else. Pain is a terrible connection. Sever yourself from that kind of union. Pain is there to alert you to do something about its source not to surrender, not to quiet you down. Growing numb does not free you. Feeling my pain and understanding where it comes from and especially not accepting a guilty position helped me stop choosing people who could not love me You can do it too.

Unloved Again shows people struggling to understand their history. The internal child will always cry in terror. Is that terror relevant to your “now?” The internal parent will always threaten the child. Should you, the adult be afraid? An adult mind declares these experiences to be from the past. It is time for achieving great emptiness in order for something new to enter. Loving someone who can love you now is living in the present.

Get my book Unloved Again today! Email me directly at elangolomg@gmail.com in order to get your signed copy. Hardcover ($25 including shipping) and Paperback ($16 Squareup.com/store/elangolomb.)

Make a joke of it. Laugh yourself right out of being mired in your culture’s negative perspective, your neighbor’s mindless receptivity , your newspaper’s acceptance of the inevitability of something totally bad happening as if we have no relationship to the cause. We need to reject, to fight against submitting to the destruction of all things. We have an important device to do it. It is humor. We can laugh at newspapers which try to shade the truth to the benefit of the owning corporation. We can laugh at the advice (not necessarily to their face) given by frightened and biased Mom and Dad, laugh at the whole damn world telling you to join them in an unstated suicide pact when you need to opt out.

The insight about the role of humor came to me last night. I was feeling very sad and helpless upon learning about the disappearance of Julian Assange of Wikileaks from the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain. I feared that he had been captured and possibly killed, possibly tortured to get him to reveal and submit. The subsequent news silence about where he is either damns or supports hope for his survival.

Then I read about the mistaken spraying with a bee-killing spray of bees in 2 US states. The staff wasn’t supposed to spray infected trees by day when bees are out gathering pollen. But whoever was in charge of spray timing did not know, did not remember or did not bother to tell the workers so they merrily sprayed by day and spread enormous death. How can we as a group be so stupid, killing those animals on which our food source depends?

Is it due to jobs being made automatic, transformed into parts done by strangers who are not plants lovers, farmers, workers who do not know, see, feel the consequences of what they do? We cannot do it right by Mother Earth after disconnecting from her. We have to be/feel part of the family of life in order to sustain our “right action.”

US companies are using neonicotinoids, an insect-killing poison known to kill bees. Neonicotinoids are currently forbidden in Europe where natural survival is honored. But not in the US where the congressional members get money to run for office from neonicotinoid selling corporations and in turn have to do their bidding. Congress is not part of the family of life. It is now a business connected to the living world in terms of power and money.

So they/we are killing bees which spread pollen that fertilizes plants which keeps the plant world growing. Does our education deliberately miss understanding pollen as an essential part of our existence? Or is this oversight due to ignorance? The bee world is dying due to our propensity for using killer chemicals against whenever we fear “out there.” We treat nature as our enemy rather than as our Mother. We believe ads which tell us to that the chemical is not dangerous. We make choices without knowing. We revert to childhood with frightening parents we had to obey or else. We keep ourselves from seeing the result.

When I originally studied psychology, Freud was said to have theorized 2 basic forces in man, a life and a death instinct. The life instinct leads to sex and procreation, to being social and enjoying life. The death instinct leads to harming/killing others as well as to harming self over and over and over again. We call this the “repetition compulsion.” It is a choice of death. But why would we choose death over life? Why would we choose to be enemies to ourselves? All matter is vibrating. We vibrate. Do we need to re-emerge into the whole and abandon the self as a seemingly separate part? Does energy need to leave its temporary fleshly abode? The why of it, so basic to life should be studied.

I was reading a bit of Krishnamurti, who said that the only thing that will keep us alive is love. It is a matter of what moves us, either love or hate; love or death. Our current leaders are in the pockets of the war machine. They make money by selling war toys and by using them. Every invented object, like small nuclear bombs created to “protect us” will be used. Children play with their toys.

Armaments make money when sold to others and by us when used to steal other countries natural resources. Corporations have a single objective which is to make money. They go for making more of it even if the consequence is death. They do not weigh consequences. They are a programmed machine for which humans are treated as pawns on the chessboard of life. Unintended death is “collateral damage.” There is no feeling, no flesh and blood reality to a machine.

I was asking myself how to emerge from my emotional paralysis. I had an inspiration, not for the first time. We often discover the same thing over and over, pushed out of our consciousness by our need to fit in. I thought we need to laugh at what plagues us. We need to laugh at our collective and individual life-destroying behavior. Humor creates a needed separation from our frightening objective. Humor is the basis for our saying, “no.”

When you feel down, defeated and isolated, find a humorous way to depict your plight and then share it. Another person laughing with you empowers your separation. It is humor that says “No problem.” It is humor says “keep your madness. I’ll have none of that. ” It is humor that says “…calling me names is a baby act that proves nothing.” Humor leads us to new ways to look at and handle problems. Humor sets us free.